Monday, October 4, 2010

Convert Windows 2003 From Dynamic Disk Back to Standard Disk

CAUTION: ONLY DO THIS IF YOU HAVEN'T EXTENDED YOUR DISK YET. DO AT YOUR OWN RISK, YOU MAY LOSE YOUR ENTIRE DRIVE. DON'T TRY ON ENCRYPTED DISKS.

I did this so that I could resize a partition using GParted after resizing a VirtualBox disk manually.

If you're not using VirtualBox, skip this part:

Firstly create a new vdi, under ~/.VirtualBox/HardDisks

#VBoxManage createhd -filename new.vdi --size 10000 --remember

#VBoxManage clonehd old.vdi new.vdi --existing

First, try following Microsoft's Instructions here and immediatley scroll to WORKAROUND section. Service Pack 2 Tools for 2003 can be found here. The tool may behave a little differently than the article suggests. If so, try this: